Al-Naqba

Since most nations gain independence in armed struggle of one sort or another, armed struggle in which some civilians inevitably suffer, then by the “logic” of the ranteurs about “Naqba Denial” the existence of all those states should also be deemed catastrophes. But Israel alone is singled out for condemnation. ~Steven Plaut

Is it really? Not by everyone. The Greeks and Armenians remember their experiences with the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of their people for the sake of an ethnically homogenous nation-state in much the same way, or in even stronger terms: as the Megali Katastrofi or as the Tseghaspanut’yun respectively. The Turkish government goes out of its way in the case of the Armenians to actively deny genocide and prosecutes those of its citizens who even hint that the extermination of the Armenians was planned and deliberate (as, of course, it was). Naturally, any state that understands that its foundation lies on the graves of the innocent or is based on the forced expulsion or relocation of hundreds of thousands of civilians will be keen to ignore the record or deny the memory of these events. Do such past crimes “delegitimise” the current state? I don’t think so. But the continued refusal to recognise the crimes for what they are is certainly not a legitimate method of defending a state against unreasonable or excessive attacks.

Of course, the “inevitable” suffering of the civilian population during such conflicts is rather more inevitable when there is a plan of expulsion that results in massacres. The final justifications in Plaut’s article, citing the far worse death tolls in the mayhem after the Partition or the ethnic cleansing and starvation of Germans after WWII, are typical diversionary moves. Plaut does not, of course, care a whit about the German victims of these expulsions, nor would any attention be brought to their case except that the scale of suffering and devastation helps to make what happened to the Palestinians seem unimportant. Rather than an old stand-by excuse that ”lots of bad things happened in that war,” Plaut has offered a different excuse: “lots of worse things have happened in other wars, which means that these events are irrelevant.” He can impugn the integrity of some (though not all) of the revisionists, but he cannot wish away evidence.

The Plaut piece a rather old-fashioned Zionist propaganda narrative–the Arabs all fled because Arab radio told them to do so, thinking they’d come back with the victorious armies. The historical consensus seems to be that there was some of that, especially among tthe well-to-do, but a lot of Arabs left either at gunpoint, or at gunpoint once-removed.

The first catastrophe (an-Nakba) for the Palestinians is that they lost the war, and many lost their land. Each side no doubt wanted to ethnically cleanse the other, and after 1948 the Arab states ethnically cleansed their Jews, too. That it’s an egg that will never be unscrambled doesn’t make it a noble saga by modern humanitarian standards. The Israelis wanted a Jewish state, not a binational one. That meant taking the lion’s share of the land and water. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, “they took Palestine.”

Where the Palestinian case differs from others is in what one might call the Second Nakba–the reception of the refugees in the Arab world. Except for Jordan, Arab countries have used the Palestinians as a distraction and a banner of grievance, but haven’t allowed them to blend into society, as say, the Smyrna and Pontic Greeks or the Sudeten Germans have done. When they are inconvenient, they get bounced, as from Kuwait after the first Gulf War. Many are also on the international dole, with the usual adverse moral effects.

There is indeed a sordid side to the story, as in most nations’ histories. So now what? Could the Palestinians abide by a peace treaty giving them a rump state without shooting improvised rockets at civilian towns in Israel? Would the Israelis allow them more than the equivalent of non-contiguous Indian reservations, controlled by checkpoints operated by snotty Israeli teenagers and interrupted by suburbs and fortress towns inhabited by fanatics from Brooklyn? No and no.

A sorry mess. Why not let them all do what they are going to do without our cluster bombs and multi-billion-dollar loans that never have to be repaid?